9 Data Centers: Unexpected Beauty And Creativity

Most data centers are boring boxes--but not all. Take a look at a data center that houses a supercomputer in a chapel, or an underground data center with James Bond-styling, or a solar-powered data center, and much, much more.

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Networking giant Cisco opened a pair of new data centers 15 miles apart in Allen, Texas, in 2011. The two sites serve as active-active mirrors of each other to ensure immediate failover in case either suffers an outage. The Metro Virtual Data Center, as Cisco calls this approach, is being adopted by the company in several other locations around the world. The centers incorporate many modern data center trends: using outside air for cooling more than half of the time, enclosed cabinets with chimneys to keep hardware exhaust air isolated from incoming chilled air, rotary UPS rather than conventional batteries, solar panels and LED lighting, and a lagoon that collects rainwater for irrigation. Image courtesy of Douglas Alger

Paul Travis is Managing Editor of InformationWeek.com. Paul got his start as a newspaper reporter, putting black smudges on dead trees in the 1970s. Eventually he moved into the digital world, covering the telecommunications industry in the 1980s (when Ma Bell was broken up) ... View Full Bio

Our latest survey shows growing demand, fixed budgets, and good reason why resellers and vendors must fight to remain relevant. One thing's for sure: The data center is poised for a wild ride, and no one wants to be left behind.